A Flood of Fawning Reviews For Apple's Latest

Like many other review sites, it seems that MacWorld can hardly find enough good things to say about the new Mac Pro, even while conceding it's probably not right for many users. 9to5 Mac has assembled a lot of the early reviews, including The Verge's, which has one of the coolest shots of its nifty design, which stacks up well against the old Pro's nifty design. The reviews mostly boil down to this: If you're in a field where you already make use of a high-end Mac for tasks like video editing, the newest one lives up to its hype.

Comments

Advancing in what direction?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hey guys, have you ever wanted to buy a workstation with half as many sockets and half as many DIMM slots as the prior generation? What if I remove all the capacity for internal expansion cards so that you can enjoy buying external cardcages? Still not sold? I've come up with the least rackable shape in the history of computing, you'll love it!

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[Kenja]

Advancing backwards. The new "Mac Pro" is just a "Mac Cube" version 2. I for one will not be buying one, which means my current Mac Pro is the last Macintosh I'll be getting. No internal drive bays, no expansion slots, not a professional computer. I would have to cover my desk with external devices to match what's in my current tower configuration.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[CanHasDIY]

People aren't buying the old one. Apple's customers don't want the size.

So, Apple's typical customer cares more about aesthetic than usefulness?

10 years ago that would have been a solid burn (because it wasn't really true); today, when I take into consideration the people I know who tend to buy Apple products*, I'd say it's a far more true statement than ever before.

* Other than the handful of graphic designers and musicians, myself included.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[lennier1]

Rackable? It's a workstation not a server.

There's actually a third-party rack in the works for these. Think of something like a wine rack, but designed to hold these instead.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[Kenja]

More stuff goes into racks then just servers. Go into any audio studio, the Mac Pro will be in a rack. Same with video editing bays. But I guess Apple isn't interested in those markets anymore. Shame really...

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[jbolden]

-- So, Apple's typical customer cares more about aesthetic than usefulness?

I'd say yes and I'm an Apple customer. The iPhone makes huge sacrifices for weight and thin. The rMBP makes huge sacrifices for weight and thin. the iMac. Yes, absolutely. aesthetics are a big part of what Apple sells.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[jbolden]

The used MacPros were an insanely good deal relative to comparable PC workstations or current iMacs. And frankly not a bad deal relative to PCs. So no, that's not true. They didn't run the latest OSX, but they would run Windows or Linux just fine if you didn't want to be stuck.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[Chas]

Rackable? It's a workstation not a server.

Internal expansion is the dirty past. Let it go. It's about as relevant electric drill attachments for sawing and sanding.

Yeah. Rackable. A lot of these types of machines are used by mobile production crews. With the 2010 MacPro you had to saw the handles off the case to get it to fit some sort of portable form factor (mobile racks). With this one, it's a step in the wrong direction. Sure, the BASE UNIT is quite hand-portable. But you then have to deal with all the peripheral devices that used to be able to mount inside a normal case.

Previously, you could simply drop your portable rack, pop the ends off, plug in power, a monitor and maybe network and go.
Now, you have to either hand-carry or unpack multiple devices just to get the same functionality.

Total memory is the significant metric, not the number of slots it fits into. And that's 12/16 GB vs 6/12GB for the older versions.

Sockets? The old Mac Pro didn't have any ThunderBolt sockets. This one has 6 ThunderBolt 2 sockets (supporting up to 36 devices).

It also has 4 USB 3 sockets (vs 5 USB 2 sockets on the old model.) Which presumably is the straw you're clutching.

Your complaints are without merit.

I think the term you're looking at is "desktop clutter". Being able to hook up umpty-jillion EXTERNAL devices is not a decent tradeoff for someone trying to get a nice, single-case solution.
I simply don't understand why Apple has such a hard on for their systems looking like an octopus.

Re:Advancing in what direction?

[phayes]

Apple is making their classic mistake again, but this time they are probably going to overstep too far to be saved.

You keep on telling yourself that. The general PC market has been shrinking year over year recently, precisely two manufacturers have been resisting the trend: Lenovo & Apple, but your basement analysis will turn that around and bring back the glory days of the beige boxes. Much as with the MBA, Apple is just ahead of the curve and the people too set in their ways to see it are criticizing what they do not understand.

I wish Apple would stop wasting time...

[maroberts]

...and produce a new 17"+ MacBook Pro with Retina display quality

Re:Not a great value, in my opinion

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Despite my lack of interest in Apple products and video editing, I actually did read the fucking article.

Adobe Premier doesn't use the second video card. It barely uses the first one. It pegs the CPU.

Apparently Final Cut X (whatever that is) is the only video editing software that features optimizations that make use of all this hardware. It's apparently wicked fast, but people hate Final Cut X. Apparently, Final Cut 7 was great, but X blows, despite running like a champ on this system.

My head did almost asplode when I saw the price tag, though. I guess the barebones model isn't that overpriced at $3k, but the configurations they mention weighing in around $10k sound like hilariously bad deals.

GPU cards for OpenCL

[SuperKendall]

Dual video cards, despite this not being a gaming system. Granted, some media editing applications can utilize multiple GPUs for computing - like Adobe Premiere Pro CC - but many cannot

On the other hand if there are a lot of professional systems that have a ton of power available to those that program in OpenCL, might not we see a new class of accelerated applications?

If nothing else it will probably get Blender to support OpenCL.

Apple has historically tried to promote a more advanced standard to make possible applications that are not written yet, but can be with new technologies.

And while currently not everything uses OpenCL, now there is powerful motivation to do so. But Photoshop, Aperture and Final Cut all make use of this hardware so there's lots of people that will benefit.